Marta Kostyuk is enjoying the best year of her career. But if there was any risk the 21-year-old Ukrainian might let her ego get the better of her, the bustling streets of Monaco are there to remind her to chill out.
"Nothing really changed in my life after I played the Australian Open quarterfinals," Kostyuk said on the WTA Insider Podcast. "Yes, it was a great result, but if I'm honest with you, if I was living in Ukraine I think I would get a lot of attention and a lot of press. Everyone would want to see me on TV and I would feel like something changed in my life.
"But I live in Monaco and, I'm sorry, but if you play quarters in a Slam, nobody cares for one second. Maybe if you win a Slam, maybe you are somewhat now a valuable person. But not when you play quarters."
Kostyuk joined the WTA Insider Podcast in April during her run to the final at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix. Stuttgart was Kostyuk's second final of the season and first on clay and it helped propel her into the Top 20 for the first time.
Listen to Kostyuk's full interview on the newest episode of the WTA Insider Podcast below:
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In fact, the first five months of 2024 have been littered with firsts for Kostyuk. The Australian Open was her first Grand Slam quarterfinal. In San Diego, she beat Jessica Pegula to notch her first Top 5 win. In Stuttgart she reeled off a trio of Top 10 wins to make her first clay-court final. It all led to her Top 20 debut.
Going into this week's French Open, Kostyuk found herself ranked inside the Top 10 on the Race to the WTA Finals Leaderboard. On Sunday, she opened her tournament with another incredible Houdini act, coming from 4-0 down in the third set to beat Brazil's Laura Pigossi 7-5, 6-7(4), 6-4. It was a victory on par with her incredible comeback win over Zheng Qinwen a few weeks earlier in Stuttgart, where she saved five match points to win.
There is no secret sauce to Kostyuk's success. Her natural talent and competitive instincts have been evident since her breakout as a 15-year-old qualifier at the 2018 Australian Open, but her emotional volatility often got the better of her.
Now, older and wiser, Kostyuk has stopped fighting against herself.
"You control [your emotions] more when you just accept them," Kostyuk said. "Like literally -- Okay, I'm going crazy now, it's fine, I accept it. I give myself this space, you know?
"Tennis is a very complex sport, but at the end of the day, it's just tennis. We all have to live somehow after the career. I'm actually very happy that I'm an emotional person because there are a lot of people who pressure their emotions to a certain level, that they're getting sick afterwards. They have illnesses. They are suffering for many years from pain or just suffering generally.
"So yeah, I think I can get better at this, but I think I'm not holding in anything. Yes, it doesn't help me sometimes in the match, but I'm a healthy person."
